Top 5 Books By Gail Omvedt That You Must Read

List of 5 books written by Gail Omvedt. Check out the booklist.

1. Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India

Born in 1891 into an untouchable family, Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is the acknowledged modern Indian leader of the struggle against social injustice. In this concise biography, eminent scholar Gail Omvedt presents the inspiring story of how Ambedkar got educated, overcame the stigma of untouchability and gradually rose to become a lawyer of international repute, a founder of a new order of Buddhism and a framer of India’s Constitution.

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2. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India

Focusing on three states―Andhra,Maharashtra and Karnataka―Dr Omvedt analyses the ideology and organization of the movement and its interaction both with the freedom struggle(particularly with Gandhi and Gandhism) and the `class` struggles of the workers and peasants (and their dominant ideology-Marxism).

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3. Seeking Begumpura : The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals

The bhakti radical Ravidas (C 1450–1520), calling himself a ‘Tanner now set free’, was the first to envision an Indian utopia in his song “Begumpura”—a modern casteless, classless, tax-free city without sorrow. This was in contrast to the dystopia of the brahmanic Kaliyuga. Rejecting Orientalist, nationalist and Hindu TV a impulses to ‘reinvent’ India, gail Omvedt threads together the world views of subaltern visionaries spanning five centuries—Chokhamela, Janabai, Kabir, Ravidas, Tukaram, the Kartabhajas, Phule, Iyothee Thass, Pandita Ramabai, Periyar, and Ambedkar.

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4. Dalit Visions: The Anti-caste Movement and the Construction on an Indian Identity

Dalit Visions explores and critiques the sensibility which equates Indian tradition with Hinduism, and Hinduism with Brahmanism; which considers the Vedas as the foundational texts of Indian culture and discovers within the Aryan heritage the essence of Indian civilization. It shows that even secular minds remain imprisoned within this Brahmanical vision, and the language of secular discourse is often steeped in a Hindu ethos.